After Goodbye
by ScullysGone
Summary: POST SEASON 6 SPOILERS! IF you haven't finished the series, and IF you don't like spoilers - STOP READING! A series of futures for the Longmire crew. Enjoy!
1. Walt

**MAJOR SEASON 6 SPOILER**

If you haven't seen it, and don't like spoilers, **STOP READING NOW**!

* * *

My husband and I sat around for a good hour after finishing S6E10 and wondering what happened to everyone. What follows will (hopefully) be a multi-chapter journey into the future of some of my favorite characters of all time.

Walt and Vic will have their own chapters. Other characters will probably be combined in logical pairings; Henry and Jacob, Cady and Zach, Ferg and Meg. I'd like to put something for Mathias in with Henry and Jacob...we'll see.

Anyway, I hope you enjoy! Please review, and I'll post Vic as soon as I can get her finished!

* * *

 **Walt**

His first time out, he is gone for two weeks. He kills rabbits and such for food, washes his face in the clear mountain streams, and wakes up every morning feeling more alive than the morning before. In the crisp mountain air, he looks forward to the day ahead with optimism he hasn't felt in a long time.

He sees country much like the land outside his front door, but feels like he's journeying through untouched bits of heaven. His horse is sure-footed, graceful even, over ground that has never felt the alien cold of iron horseshoes.

At night, he puts his back to the fire and looks at the black sky, the Great Bear watching over him while he sleeps. Henry comes to mind often.

And Vic.

He packed salt and coffee, has enough ammunition for the rifle to keep himself both fed and protected. He told her he could be gone 'for a while'. He knows he can stay out for another week at least, but he finds himself riding for hours without thinking about the treasure. Instead, he's thinking about Vic.

About how she has made a staggering difference, in every respect. How she is strong and bold. Abrasive, in the beginning. She is a damn good cop, but she almost ruined her chances in Absaroka County, trying to force the level of respect she actually deserves.

And how she has a terrible poker face. About how he knows things she never says because her face is always telling her secrets. But he is ok with that. Especially now, when he wants more than anything to not be in the business of keeping secrets from those he loves anymore.

She's changed something inside him. Or maybe time has. He doesn't know which, but he wants to go home. It's a feeling he hasn't had in a long time; it feels foreign against his chest, but familiar, too.

The cabin isn't just a stale and empty vessel for memories of Martha anymore. Vic came in and now he loves the way she makes the house smell. It smells like new beginnings and fresh starts and not like hollow pain. It smells like coffee he didn't make and lotion he wouldn't use and peace he has forgotten. She doesn't hum like Martha used to, but there is music in her presence.

He wants to go home, and the truth in his yearning makes him smile.

The cell phone in his pocket vibrates, the ringtone muffled by dingy denim, and his smile broadens; it's her. It can only be her. She gave him the phone before he left. Said she was grateful she didn't have to worry about him getting shot on a raid anymore, but she'd be damned if she was going to let him ride off into the sunset without a leash.

He had guffawed at the gesture, but knew behind the mock-ownership of her words, there was a genuine fear that he wouldn't allow to grow. He took the phone, kissed her lips and told her thanks.

He pulls the phone from his pocket and answers.

"Hello?"

"So, are you rich yet?"

He smiles again.

"I was rich before I left."

He leaves the words hanging in the air. They have been very good at saying just enough.

"Hey, Vic?"

"Yeah, Walt?"

"I'm coming home."

* * *

After months of searching, Walt finds the Anson Hamilton treasure, right where Lucien's clues led him. Vic stands above him, holding the reins of their horses and a shovel. He smiles up at her from the dirt, his hand on the latch of the trophy half-uncovered in the packed ground.

"Wanna see what's inside?"

"If you tell me you dragged me out here just to half-dig it up, and not look inside, I'll shoot you myself. Then I'll go back home and ice my ass and drink the rest of the beer that's in the fridge."

He laughs. She's softened around the edges recently, but only a little. She lingers in his arms. Seeks out the crook of his neck when they sit by the fire. Moans softly in her sleep when he shifts to hold her closer.

But she's still the hard-ass cop she's always been. And he loves her.

"You'd never get away with it. Cady knows you're here."

"She likes me better than you now. And I'm a cop; I know how to make it look like an accident. You're screwed if you don't open that damn box."

He laughs again.

"Alright."

He lifts the lid.

"Huh..."

Her word comes out as a statement, rather than a question.

"Well, that's not what I expected."

She says what they are both thinking, but there is no more disappointment in her voice than there is in his own mind. He closes the lid back and hoists himself out of the hole. She dusts off the front of his shirt as he wipes the wet and grime from his face.

"I think I would have liked Anson Hamilton, if I had known him."

"And why is that, Walt?"

"Because of what's inside that box."

She rolls her eyes in the way that always tells him she's exasperated, but not angry. No poker face at all. And he reads her even better now than before. He puts a quick kiss on her cheek and walks to his saddle bag, pulls out a piece of paper and a pencil; the supplies had been for final goodbyes if anything had happened to him when he was alone.

With quick strokes, he makes some marks, and folds the paper. Walking back to the hole, Vic scoffs.

"Aren't you at least gonna tell me what you wrote?"

Turning, he faces her, the sun behind her making her hair golden and glowing. He hands her the paper.

 _It will always be about more than what you find after searching. If it's not, then you've missed the point. Remember the asymptote._

Her lips purse, the dimples on her chin and the welling in her eyes giving away her understanding. Head cocked to the side, she clears her throat, looks in his eyes and smiles.

"I still think the two of you are bat-shit crazy."

He laughs again.

"Maybe."

They do their best to make the ground look un-dug, scattering rocks and ground cover. Walt spreads Lucien's ashes and says his goodbye to the old lawman, his friend.

Vic mounts Walt's Horse, as she's come to call him, and waits. As he walks back to her, he looks across the landscape and decides he still lives in heaven on earth. It looks a little different than it did when he and Martha first laid the logs of their home, but different can be a good thing. Usually, it's a good thing, when people have the courage to see it in a different light.


	2. Vic

**VIC**

Vic climbs the steps to the Absaroka County Sheriff's Department, avoiding the blank space at the top of the department's name board. It's been a couple of weeks, and he says he's never been more at peace, but she still feels a little guilty when she sees his name is gone.

Pushing past the board and through the door, she says good morning to Ruby, walks straight to the coffee pot and tells Ferg thanks for putting the pot on.

"Wasn't me."

"Oh. Well, thank you, Ruby."

Ruby shakes her head.

"Wasn't me, either."

Vic stops pouring.

"Shit. I'm sorry, Zach. Good morning. Ummm, thanks for the coffee."

Zach's head snaps around. She had walked right past him. He is a good cop, with spot-on instincts, deadly aim, and quiet as a damn church mouse.

"What? Oh..umm..'morning, Sheriff."

She rolls her eyes.

"Vic, I put your phone messages on your desk, along with the mail."

She walks to her desk and looks around, lifting the stack of files on the corner she shares with Ferg, but finds nothing beyond what he left there last night.

"Where, Ruby?"

Ruby raises her eyebrows, a gesture she does to Vic a lot lately, and points to Walt's office.

"Shit."

She drops her chin to her chest, turns abruptly and heads for the open door at the end of the short hallway. She can't help but stop short at the threshold, the empty chair behind his desk feeling out of place. Quickly, she steps inside and closes the door behind her, not wanting to see Ferg's face peering from his desk.

Sitting in his chair, she remembers telling him she couldn't keep waiting to find out if he was going to die in the next touch-and-go situation. She remembers the words tumbling out, and before she knew it, she had effectually asked him to quit the job. To stop being Sheriff Walt Longmire. To do it for her.

The part that always makes her ache inside, sometimes in a good way, sometimes not, is that he did it. Walt turned over his badge within a week, pegged Cady as a replacement, and started gathering supplies for that damn treasure hunt. Just like that. When he said 'ok', she had blinked hard.

' _Really?'_

' _Mm-hmm. I've been looking for the right time, the right reason, to leave for a while, Vic. I can't think of a better reason than this.'_

He had kissed her softly, pulling his hands across the small of her back and tugging them closer together. He made love to her again and everything felt like it was going to be ok.

Then Sawyer made her the damn Acting Sheriff and it all felt wrong. Ruby insists she sit in this office, behind his desk. Says she has to at least pretend to be in charge; Ferg and Zach need to know what they are supposed to do every day, and she has to be the one to tell them. So, Ruby says, she might as well do it from the same chair Walt did it from.

Weeks go by and Walt is gone treasure hunting and business around Absaroka County continues on. There are small crimes here and there. Ferg has been just busy enough to not be a nuisance, and Zach is learning quickly. She gets bored and takes cases from them because she can't stand the quiet.

After two weeks of Walt being gone, she can't stand the quiet at the cabin either; she breaks down and calls him.

When they were about to take down Malachi, she knew she couldn't stand the unspoken any longer. Unable to keep it inside, she forced her hand, threw her fear in his face and waited for whatever would come next. 'Goodbye is always implied' he had said, and her heart sank.

Then he kissed her, urgent and without hesitation, and she knew she didn't trust herself to survive losing him. Losing her baby, her daughter, had nearly driven her to put a bullet through her head. Walt, though she was afraid to admit it, was at least as important to her as the child she would never know.

"Hello?"

His voice brings tears to her eyes, though she'll never tell him that.

"So, are you rich yet?"

What she really means is 'when are you coming home?' It's hard for her to admit, even to herself, that she needs him more than she realized in the beginning. She wipes her cheeks and a small laugh escapes. She can almost hear him smile on the other end of the cell phone she insisted he carry.

"Hey, Vic?"

"Yeah, Walt?"

"I'm coming home."

* * *

In the places between awake and asleep, between life and death, she feels her body moving. The pain is white-hot and everywhere and someone is screaming at her. Something is terribly wrong but she can't remember what.

"Hold on, Vic! Hold on, damit!"

She tries to say his name, to put a word on the fear that pours like blood from an open wound. But her lips are glued shut, her tongue an anvil sitting inside the desert of her mouth.

She's cold, the shivering she can't control spreading the fire that consumes her muscles. So much pain. She's been shot before but this feels different. Worse. When she lost her baby, the fire from the hole in her leg only ruled her from the hip down.

Before her ears go silent and the pain disappears, she sees the face of her daughter; her blonde hair and wide eyes, and her pink lips are moving. Vic understands what she cannot hear and then the blackness devours her.

She wakes slowly, parts of her body coming back into focus in odd succession. First, her ears. She can make out the familiar sounds of a hospital, beeps and whirring and machines and people talking around her in hushed voices.

Words like 'surgery' and 'alive' and 'lucky' hang in the air above her. Soon, she can feel the dull pain of healing wounds, muted by narcotics and sleeping medicine. Like a dream she remembers only hours after waking, the story starts to unfold in her stretching mind.

The details are fuzzy but it doesn't matter; they are always the same. Cop stuff. Bad guys. Gun shots. A thin blue line covered in blood. Her blood, this time. Testing the muscles in her fingers and toes, pain intensifies in her right arm and she hears a foreign moan break through the seal of her lips.

Cady's voice fills the empty spaces, concern and relief in equal measure.

"Vic? Can you hear me? Zach, get Meg. I think she's waking up. Vic? C'mon, Vic."

It takes entirely too much concentration to control her eyelids, but she finally wills them open. Cady's face comes in and out of focus, her eyes red-rimmed and moist. Vic decides she looks more like her mother than Walt, imagining the same look on Martha's face the first time he got himself on the wrong end of a suspect's gun.

Walt.

Moving as quickly as her drugged-up muscles will allow, she scans the room for his weathered face, her ears pricked for the sound of his breathing. She finds Zach, standing just inside the door, arms crossed over his chest and peering at her from under the concern of his brow. Meg, Ferg's fiance' and apparently her nurse, is pushing buttons and moving equipment on the left side of the bed; the cuff around her left arm tightens.

Beyond Meg, she sees nothing but an empty chair and barren walls. He's not here. She turns back to Cady, a tear following the contour of her hollowed cheek. Why isn't he here, she pleads with her eyes.

"Ferg went to find him. He's coming, Vic."

She closes her eyes against the pain and falls asleep fitfully.

In her dreams, she sees the faces of the dead. Of Martha and her daughter. Of Bobby Donolato and Chance Gilbert. She sees Marilyn, The Crow Medicine Woman, and Mingan Takoda. The dead don't speak; they stare, all the eyes fixed on her and she feels like she doesn't belong in front of them.

When she wakes, Henry is beside her, and Walt is not. Cady offers a drink of water and the glue in her mouth begins to loosen.

"How long?"

"How long have you been asleep? For about four hours. You have been in the hospital since yesterday morning, early. It would appear that things did not go well - "

She shakes her head.

"I remember."

She wishes she didn't.

"Where's Walt?"

"Ferg found him about an hour after I arrived here. They should be here soon."

"How much does he know?"

"Knowing his persistent nature, and the topic of discussion, I would imagine he has managed to terrify Ferg into telling him everything, Vic."

She closes her eyes, the throbbing between her ears more about the pain she knows she'll see on his face than the pain breaking through the medicine.

"Shit. I can't do this anymore."

"Do what, Vic?"

"I can't keep being a cop and stay with Walt, Henry."

"Well, luckily that is not a decision you have to make right this instant. And, frankly, I would advise against it anyway. You are under heavy medication. It would not be wise."

* * *

A week has passed and she sits on the front porch of the cabin, hot tea in her mug and wearing Walt's coat over her jeans and thermal shirt, and breaths in the fall air. The leaves are turning colors, like the bruises healing across her body, and she thinks how the season is parallelling her life.

Things are changing. Just how much, she doesn't know yet, and that's what scares the hell out of her. Being a cop was easy when she was the only person on her list to worry about.

"What'cha doin?"

He's right behind her, appearing almost out of nowhere, but his voice doesn't startle her and she smiles. The man can move through the house noiselessly, even carrying 225 pounds over creaky boards, and he still can't sneak up and scare her. Everything about him brings a peace inside her she never knew before, and is certain she will never find again.

"Being happy."

She tries to smile through the words, even though he can't see her face.

"Liar."

He always calls her bluff. No poker face, he always says. Apparently it translates to her voice, too. She can't even lie to him over the phone.

"I'm just wondering who I am. If I'm not a cop...I don't know who I am without a badge. I don't know what to do about it, either. I mean, I can't be like those women who have to start over after a divorce or something, so they go to the community college and take a couple classes and _find themselves_. I'm not that kind of woman, Walt. I'm a cop. And if I'm not…"

Silence is the only way she can finish the sentence; there are no words for the unknown. Walt moves closer behind her, pulls the hair away from her neck and kisses softly. His arms weave under hers, wrapping around her waist and gently pulling their bodies together. He rests his chin on her shoulder and breathes in the breeze.

"You don't have to quit being a cop, Vic."

She knows he'll never ask her to quit.

"I know. But I can't keep seeing the same look in your eyes I begged you not to put in mine. I can't keep acting like the job matters to me more than you do. You've never asked me to leave it behind. But I don't want to leave you. Not ever, and certainly not because I was too selfish to lay it down. I just don't know what I'm supposed to do after that. I don't know what's left of me after that."

Walt moves from behind her, past the railing and down the steps. Hands on his hips, he looks around the land stretching out before them both.

"Well, I have an idea. You see, Vic, there's a whole lot of country out there. The ends of the earth, even. And I don't think God made all of it just so we could stand still in one place."

In three strides he is standing in front of her, arms up over the rail and reaching for her. She answers his call, sliding between the palms of his hands. His smile kills her and she knows she's put the badge on for the last time.

"Come with me, Vic. Come to the ends of the earth with me. We'll find out who we both are."


End file.
